Week three is complete and it’s crazy that we are halfway through the internship! Our time in the program has gone by so fast, and I along with my team have begun to learn the importance of looking back on our work and discussions to facilitate greater understanding of what we have covered and get the most we can out of the internship. Whether it be our casual conversations about COVID-19 in the United States versus Malawi, the need for public health education globally, or what the patterns in our stakeholder maps mean, we have really started to dive deeper as a team and come together to learn from one another. Coming into this week, I was excited to further explore technology development in low resource settings and needs finding for global health, a key component of the internship.

This week has been focused on expanding our understanding of our designs and getting back to the engineering basics. On Monday the group workshop conducted by our TAs Hannah and Aubrey covered the principles of presentations to guide us when presenting to stakeholders and other audiences as well as the basics of technical writing and documentation. During my experience in the Rice 360 Global Health Capstone course, I learned how important informative yet succinct documentation is when working in a team and collaborating with outside partners. Successfully written documentation, whether it be a final report or something as simple as an update memo, can greatly help with communication in a group, especially in a virtual setting. While I had some prior experience in technical writing, it was helpful to receive a refresher in the “do’s” and “don’ts” of writing for an technical or engineering audience as we head into stakeholder interviews next week.

The following day, June 30, was Presidential Election Day in Malawi so we did not have group workshop or any team meetings. As this was not a typical election for the country and the process differs from the United States, I thought it’d be worthwhile to share some interesting facts surrounding the election circumstances and outcomes:

• Elections were initially held last May, however the Constitutional Court annulled the results because of evidence of irregularities and poorly managed elections. This is the first time this happened in Malawi, and only the second time a “re-do” election has happened in Africa!
• In addition to other concerns about fraudulent actions, it was alleged that the 2019 ballots were tampered with using the correction white-out fluid locally called Tipp-Ex to alter votes.
• The voting system in Malawi changed from a first-past-the-post system, in which the candidate with the most vote wins, to a two-round system, which involves one round of all the candidates and a second voting round of the top two candidates.
• The election was a landslide victory for Lazarus Chakwera of the Malawi Congress Party who defeated Peter Mutharika of the Democratic Progressive Party, the previous president that was seeking a second term and had won initially in the 2019 election.

On Wednesday the guest speaker for our group workshop was Wayne Decker from Flame Tree Initiative, an organization that focuses on growing social entrepreneurship in Malawi. His presentation focused on innovation and the productive use of energy in low resource settings. This was my first exposure to the concept of energy poverty and the downstream effects that a lack of energy poses on a country and individual community. We learned that existing electrical grids in Africa are not built for rural development or public health purposes; rather, they reflect resource allocation and prior colonialism that causes significant issues in energy distribution and access. Since only 11% of Malawi is connected to the national electric grid there is a need for the productive use of energy to maximize the benefits of the limited energy available. Decker connected this back to our projects in the internship through discussions within our team about the ways we can have a productive use of energy regarding our device function and manufacturing.

On Thursday we switched our focus to the needs finding side of global health as a significant goal in the internship is to find needs that fit the focus of Rice 360 and could be addressed by future teams. Through a presentation by Million Mafuta from the University of Malawi The Polytechnic, we explored the necessary steps of scoping a potential project through interactive problem solving examples that we then related back to our own prototypes.

Our final activity of the week on Friday focused on local digital health innovation in Malawi presented by Dumisani Kaliati.

To end the week, the TAs held a virtual scavenger event for us where we competed in our design teams to solve riddles and race to take pictures of the riddle answer. The highlight of the game was definitely fellow intern Andrew’s blurry selfies and ridiculous speed (someone I almost always ended up second to him no matter how fast I ran). Despite my team’s quickness with answering riddles and my effort in quickly sending pictures, we ended up tied for 2^nd place out of the three teams. Though we hoped we would have a greater comeback, my team and I had a fun time interacting with the other interns and we’ve definitely grown to appreciate the social aspect of our internship. My team also took the time on Saturday to meet as a group to conduct further brainstorming together. Using Google Slides, we each wrote or drew as many ideas we could think of within 10 minutes for both prototypes then went over each of our ideas; we then each started bouncing off each other’s ideas and came up with some new concepts for us to explore. We ended our session with numerous ideas that we wanted to research and develop further ourselves, and we also planned to use the ideas as examples for the stakeholders next week.

This past week was busy with interactive workshops and activities covering engineering design and community interaction to prepare us for the next step of the internship, stakeholder interviews, where we’ll be talking with individuals and experts from manufacturing, entrepreneurship, and clinical fields to gain a better understanding of our projects and some initial feedback on the prototypes and our brainstormed solutions. I look forward to everyone we’ll get to speak with and the input they will have to advance our prototypes and projects!

See you next time,

Lauren

 

 

 

Information on the 2020 Malawi election was found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Malawian_presidential_election and https://www.voanews.com/africa/malawi-opposition-leader-wins-fresh-elections-landslide-victory